For years, Laconia Christian Academy Head of School Rick Duba used to take a group of juniors and seniors on an annual mission trip to Honduras.
As part of each visit, they would travel to a new neighborhood in the Central American country and spend a day with the children there. Sometimes, they would paint the kids’ faces, give them candy and mime the gospel story.
“Then we would leave and never come back to that barrio,” Duba said.
As the trips piled up, Duba started to grow increasingly uncomfortable with the arrangement. Like many leaders of Christian organizations, he had grown up steeped in the tradition of the mission, but he began to question whether that approach was productive for the Honduran people.
“We’re going to come in and we’re going to do our thing and we’re going to give you candy and food, and all that kind of stuff,” Duba said. Then, “we’re going to leave and two days from now you’ll be exactly where you were before we came.”
At the time, Duba had a daughter living in Honduras. She had grown close with members of 18th Street Gang, who controlled the neighborhoods they visited. Duba’s daughter worried that the students were leaving a country she had grown to love with a warped perspective of it.
“Her concern was we were only showing our American students the worst that Honduras had, and not the beauty,” Duba recalled.
Around 2018, pressed by his daughter and motivated by his own growing discomfort, Duba embarked on a grand rethinking of Laconia Christian’s annual trip, transforming it from a mission to a service learning experience that focuses on sustainable development rather than one-off relief.
“Our goal is to come alongside the people in the countries we serve,” Duba said. “And that is sustainable for them because now they have an investment; they didn’t come in on a one-off kind of mission deal.”
In 2019, in the first year of the new model, the school traveled to Rwanda at the invitation of Jeanine Mukarubega, a Laconia Christian parent, Rwandan genocide survivor and director of an aid organization in the country.
Since then, the school has also gone to Israel, Guatemala and the U.S.-Mexico border, among many other places.
Last month, for the first time since the 2019 visit, the school returned to Rwanda, where the new model began. The 12-day trip was in some respects a full-circle moment for Laconia Christian’s reimagined approach to these experiences.
Rather than paint children’s faces or do construction work that might deprive locals of jobs, Laconia Christian gifted eight cows to Rwandan villagers. The animals — which will both provide milk and provide offspring — are among the most enduring resources in rural parts of the country, according to some of the students who went on the trip.
In the village that received the bulk of the cows, hundreds of people came together for a ceremony when the Laconia Christian group arrived.
“Seeing how happy and celebratory they were over receiving six cows for their village and just seeing the looks of joy on the parents’ faces as we gave the kids the milk just made me realize — even through something that to us might seem small, like giving cows — it really just leaves a huge impact on these people and their lives,” senior Jakai Gage said.
Laconia Christian’s connection to Rwanda stems from Mukarubega, who runs the Rwanda Children Educational Foundation. The organization sponsors children’s schooling, supplies micro-loans for their families and builds housing. A substantial portion of the organization’s funding comes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where Mukarubega moved after leaving Rwanda.
Laconia Christian raised $50,000 for their trip, about $6,000 of which went towards purchasing the eight cows.
Twelve students traveled over 24 hours to Kigali, the country’s capital, where they were based for the bulk of the visit. On many days, they left the city to visit small towns where Mukarubega’s organization has a presence.
The impact of the country’s genocide was present everywhere they went, the students said. In villages, there were few older men. Often, as they drove, they passed small memorials on the side of the road where people had been massacred.
In the capital city, the group visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial. There, a Rwandan journalist asked seniors Brendan Call and Natalie Bleiler whether they believed another genocide could happen again.
Bleiler said she reflected on the propaganda that started the genocide.
“It doesn’t just happen overnight; it’s a process of turning people against each other, and I think … if we don’t want things like that to happen, we have to notice when propaganda is being fed to us about other groups,” Bleiler said in an interview with the Monitor.
At the end of the trip, the group traveled several hours to Volcanoes National Park, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. There, they split into groups and hiked into the forest to see gorillas. Only a couple thousand people in the world have seen the animals in the wild, the students said.
The gorillas were relatively friendly. One of them grabbed Call’s foot. The students’ guides could “speak gorilla” by relying on about 20 different vocal tones that the animals seemed to understand, they said.
But the most memorable experience of the trip for Bleiler was not the gorillas, but rather a visit to a school in Kigali. A girl she met there whispered to her and two others: “You see us with your hearts.”
“To me, that kind of just encapsulated what the trip was,” Bleiler said. “You go on a lot of service trips and it’s just doing jobs, doing labor, whatever you can for the communities, but that’s not what we focused on with this. We focused on being an outreach to people and being there for people.”
